I am not opposed to issues per se. The problem is dealing with the amount, it's exhausting. It's just too easy to make issue or comment on GitHub because of network effect. This sums it up pretty well: https://nolanlawson.com/2017/03/05/what-it-feels-like-to-be-... (my workload is of course far smaller, but still it takes time and saps energy)
Yes, that issue has been opened for 4 years and I don't consider it important and neither did any of "me too" comments to do anything about it. At best I sometimes get drive by PR, which takes far more time to deal with than if I just did it myself.
I feel as though your question conflates FOSS with free SaaS compute, but https://salsa.debian.org/help/instance_configuration#gitlab-... shows they are using the community edition (MIT https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/blob/v16.10.0/LI... ) and using GitLab Pages so that's "editor in the web", "CI/CD compute", "website hosting" right there. I believe codespaces is "we run a docker container with vscode in it" so kind of a subset of "CI compute" but since I don't use that, I can't speak to whether it's included in the FOSS side of GitLab or not
> I feel as though your question conflates FOSS with free SaaS compute
My comment did not. The comment I replied to did. It said:
> especially with the number of actual FOSS alternatives available right now
I find GitLab quite lacking to GitHub and don't particularly see it as a compelling alternative to GitHub. Plus, there is no actual benefit to it being FOSS.
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests?scope=... would disagree as would the top section of every release notes post showing which community member made the biggest contribution to that GitLab release. That's not even counting the fun things I can do to my own copy of GitLab which I can modify and host for my organization's needs, no AGPL, no reverse engineering obfuscated ruby from a .vhd, just actual open source
You are welcome to find GitLab lacking (there's currently at least 66500 people who agree with you), and "compelling" is up to you, but to say it's not a full featured competitor to GitHub is disingenuous
Using another platform/self-host would introduce a friction.